Disability in the Populist Press: An Investigation of British Tabloids

The last two decades have seen some major changes in how Western societies have treated disabled people, so much so that disability has become an equality issue. However, progress on legislation and rights stands in contrast to a partial failure to transform perceptions and practices in society. In that respect, the impact of the media cannot be underestimated. They do convey dominant views on the issue of disability, fostering specific representations of disabled people. Within the UK, the populist press coverage seems to deserve some attention since, according to the Turn2us report, up until 2011 there was a trend to report disability by negatively connoting the issue especially in tabloids. An analysis carried out at the LSE has shown that public debates in UK have become increasingly populist over the years, so that populism can be actually said to be more and more widespread (Rooduijn 2014). Moving from these assumptions as much as from the linguistic investigation conducted by the Glasgow Media Group and the Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research on the British media coverage of disability in 2004-5 and 2010-11, this chapter examines the news reports on disability in 2016-17. It analyses a corpus of about 3,450 articles collected from some British populist tabloid newspapers - Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Record, Daily Star, The Sun - by searching for the terms ‘disabilit*’ and ‘disabled’. The study focuses on the types of stories featured by the newspapers and the extent to which they employ negative vocabulary to connote disability in terms of need, discrimination, human rights, barriers, stigma or dishonesty, lack of effort, benefit dependency, fraud, etc. In order to track potential changes and media responses to welfare policies, an investigation of the emerging linguistic and discursive patterns will be carried out to shed light on the most popular themes mentioned in relation to disability and the main linguistic construals of such issue.